Nearly a decade ago, AOL cofounder Steve Case was at a conference when a promising young entrepreneur « sheepishly » approached him to share how Case had unintentionally helped turn him into a coder.

As Case recalled in a recent interview, the man approached him and said: « I just want you to know that I learned to program when I was 13-years-old by hacking into the AIM system. »

The coder was none other than Mark Zuckerberg, then in his early 20s and running a fast-growing startup called Facebook. 

« He mentioned the hacking group he was part of and I actually remembered the name. They were one of the most notorious ones, » Case recalled in an interview this week on Mashable‘s Biz Please podcast, which you can listen to below or download on iTunes or Stitcher. « We had a team of people trying to protect us from people like Mark. but we were glad we could give him some experience in [his] early days of coding. » Read more…